Founding Software Engineer

Founding Software Engineer San Francisco |

Up to $300k USD + Equity (0.1% to 1%)

Some jobs let you join a company. This one lets you help build it.

One of Big Wave Digital's premier AI startup clients is assembling a small, elite engineering team in San Francisco. They've developed cutting-edge AI technology tackling complex unstructured data problems and are now entering a rapid growth phase.

This is one of those rare opportunities where your fingerprints will be on everything: the product, the architecture, the engineering culture, deployment strategy, scalability, reliability and technical standards.

You'll work directly with founders, researchers and some exceptionally smart people solving genuinely difficult technical challenges. No layers of management. No endless meetings. No maintaining legacy systems built ten years ago. Just building ambitious technology from the ground up and taking it into the hands of enterprise customers.

WHAT YOU'LL BE BUILDING

You'll own the backend systems and infrastructure that power next-generation AI applications at scale. Think:

• Distributed backend systems • High-throughput, low-latency services • Cloud-native architecture • Production AI infrastructure • Enterprise deployments • Reliability, observability and scalability

You'll help take ideas from whiteboard sketches and research prototypes all the way through to production systems used by real customers.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• Architecting and building scalable backend platforms • Designing distributed systems that handle serious workloads • Owning cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines and production environments • Building Kubernetes-based platforms and deployment frameworks • Creating monitoring, observability and reliability tooling • Driving CI/CD best practices across engineering • Working closely with founders on critical technical decisions • Helping shape the engineering culture from day one • Scaling systems from startup MVP through to enterprise-grade deployments

YOU'LL PROBABLY HAVE

• Strong Python engineering experience • Experience building production-grade backend systems • Solid knowledge of distributed systems and scalable architectures • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes and containerised deployments • AWS, GCP or Azure expertise • Experience with Terraform, Pulumi or infrastructure-as-code tooling • A strong understanding of system performance, monitoring and reliability • A genuine builder mentality and ownership mindset

BONUS POINTS

• Rust or C++ • AI, ML or LLM infrastructure experience • GPU-heavy workload experience • Experience supporting enterprise deployments • Startup or founding engineer experience

WHY THIS ROLE IS SPECIAL

Opportunities to become employee #5, #10 or #15 don't come around every day. You'll have direct influence over product direction, technical architecture and company growth, and the engineering decisions you make today will still be shaping the company years from now. Alongside a highly competitive salary, you'll receive meaningful equity, giving you a genuine stake in the upside you're helping create.

THE PACKAGE

• Up to $300k USD salary • Equity from 0.1% to 1% • Full health insurance • Company laptop • Food and transport credits • Visa sponsorship available • Based in San Francisco, full-time, onsite

If you're the kind of engineer who wants ownership, autonomy, technical complexity and the chance to build something that matters, let's talk.

A couple of notes. I tightened a few phrases ("handle serious workloads," "a genuine stake in the upside") but changed nothing substantive. Worth adding an apply mechanic at the end before posting: a DM prompt, your email, or the BWD job link, since LinkedIn posts with a clear next step convert noticeably better than "let's talk" alone. And given visa sponsorship is on the table, this is a strong one to push to your APAC network specifically; that's your differentiator on this search.